From Watts Up With That?
In the latest episode of what could be mistaken for a satirical comedy, Dr. Peter Kalmus, a self-proclaimed climate activist and NASA scientist, has expressed his dismay over the recent COP28 summit. His opinion piece, “COP Out: Wrapping Up a Useless Climate Summit That Should Fool Nobody,” reads like a script from a dystopian drama where the villains are fossil fuels, and the heroes are, well, apparently not the attendees of COP28.
Kalmus paints a picture of COP28 as a grand assembly of the world’s elite, jetting in on their private planes to a petrostate, to discuss the perils of the very industry that fueled their arrival. The irony is so thick here that one could cut it with a knife. The summit, according to Kalmus, was nothing more than a stage for the fossil fuel industry to make “dirty side deals”.
Some wealthy humans flew on private jets to the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate, for a two-week meeting. Many of these humans work for the fossil fuel industry. The petrostate leveraged its host status for dirty side deals to expand fossil fuels. There was a session on sustainable megayacht ownership.
The appointment of Sultan al-Jaber, a fossil fuel CEO, as the presiding official of a climate summit is akin to putting a fox in charge of the henhouse, suggests Kalmus. His portrayal of al-Jaber’s promises to continue investing in oil and expanding fossil fuels post-summit paints a picture of a mustache-twirling villain, gleefully plotting the world’s demise.
The presiding official was a fossil fuel CEO, Sultan al-Jaber, who, days earlier, had said some anti-science, denialist garbage-words. Two days after the meeting ended, he promised that his oil corporation will continue investing in oil and expanding fossil fuels. OPEC, in a joint statement with the Gas Exporting Countries Forum, congratulated the UAE on the “positive outcome” for the fossil fuel industry.
Kalmus doesn’t hold back in his apocalyptic vision of a world ravaged by global heating, with floods, fires, and broken systems. The fossil fuel industry and industrial animal agriculture are the chief architects of this impending doom. One might expect a superhero to swoop in any moment now to save the day, but alas, this is the real world, and Kalmus seems to believe we’re fresh out of caped crusaders.
We are all in grave danger from global heating, which appears to be accelerating, is irreversible, and is driving all the flooding and heat and fires. It’s caused almost entirely by the fossil fuel industry, with industrial animal agriculture in second place.
The COP28’s 21-page “global stocktake” is ridiculed as too little, too late. Kalmus is appalled that it took thirty years just to mention fossil fuels in a COP decision text. The stocktake’s call for transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems is dismissed as nonbinding, unquantitative, and insincere. It’s as if Kalmus expected a binding global treaty to be signed then and there, magically solving all climate issues.
The wealthy fossil-fuel-industry-influenced humans at COP28 produced 21 pages called the “global stocktake.” The stocktake mentions “fossil fuels” once, on page 4. People who wish to argue that COP28 wasn’t a complete failure have been calling this “historic.” And technically it is, because fossil fuels have never been mentioned in a COP decision text.
The loss and damage pledges from rich nations, amounting to $700 million, are scoffed at as grossly inadequate. Kalmus compares the United States’ pledge of less than $20 million to the budget of an average high school, highlighting the disparity between the scale of the problem and the response.
In Kalmus’s eyes, COP28 was nothing short of a spectacular failure, a charade that serves only to perpetuate the status quo. He calls for a new international summit and fossil fuel treaty system, free from the influence of the fossil fuel industry. His solution? A stronger climate movement and a ban on the fossil fuel industry from negotiations.
We need to start by agreeing that COP28, like other COPs, was a complete failure. Claiming that it was somehow not a failure, clinging to bits of false hope, generates a powerful illusion that business as usual can continue. We’ve been doing this for 30 years now. The possibility of keeping heating to under 1.5 degrees C has been squandered. If we cling to false hope that it’s working, we will keep doing it, year after year, making no progress. This is what the fossil fuel industry wants; this is how we lose a planet.
We then need to establish an international summit and fossil fuel treaty system that isn’t broken under the weight of fossil fuel industry corruption. To do this, we need to ban the fossil fuel industry from the negotiations, and doing this will require a stronger climate movement. Every single one of us can work, in our own way, to make the movement stronger. Be a climate activist: join with other climate activists—we’re not hard to find—and take risks. It’s up to us.